Professional, Polite, Prepared to Kill

CNN and O’Reilly Are Distorting The Energy Issue

After paying $65.00 to put 14 gallons of gas in my car the other day, I came home and sat down to watch “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News. I no longer watch the arrogant Bill O’Reilly now; that was the last straw.

First out on his program was his “Talking Points” in which he discussed the reason for the high cost of gas today. It has become painfully apparent that O’Reilly’s understanding of the issues behind the cost of gas is as pathetic as his understanding of the reasons for our invasion of Iraq. It’s not about oil company greed, Bill, and it wasn’t solely about Saddam’s WMDs. O’Reilly has been hanging around with too many leftists in the media.

In O’Reilly’s view, the high price of gas today is due solely to “oil company greed.” I thought Mr. O’Reilly was smarter than that, but this is the knee jerk reaction of an ignorant and uninformed simpleton, consumed by the propaganda of the left. For a guy who calls his program “the no spin zone,” O’Reilly has been emerged in liberal spin and doesn’t even know it.

I switched off O’Reilly and went over to CNN to see what was going on there. What I saw was even more misleading than what O’Reilly was spewing, but we expect that from CNN. What I didn’t expect was the report that aired shortly after I changed channels. You can see it here.

Wolf Blitzer turned the segment over to CNN’s Ali Velshi with the topic “who is responsible for today’s gas prices?” Repeating Democrat rhetoric that oil companies have 70 million acres for drilling that are not being used, Blitzer asks “where is all of this untapped oil?”

Velshi, standing in front of a graphic showing both east and west coasts of the U.S. riveted with no drilling zones due to environmental concerns, then focused on the Gulf of Mexico. The graphic then showed a grid-work confined to the northwest corner of the gulf which represented the areas that oil drilling is permitted. Velshi points out that although there are about 4000 wells currently working, there are many of these grid sectors that do not have wells.

Nowhere in the segment does Blitzer of Velshi mention that an oil company lease on a sector does not guarantee oil exists in that sector. Neither one of them, apparently, paid any attention to the oil company executives’ testimony before Congress, where they explained their methods of locating underground or undersea oil and why they don’t put up expensive oil rigs where they know there is no oil.

Also, today’s deep water oil rigs are capable of sinking multiple wells from one rig which can angle out to reach pockets of oil that are not below the rig, otherwise known as “slant drilling.” They don’t need an oil rig on every acre. Then too, the further you go offshore, the deeper the water gets, and the more it costs to drill.

The question posed by Blitzer was then why do oil companies want to open up coastal offshore areas for drilling when they have all this untapped oil in the gulf? If Blitzer and Velshi’s premise was right – that all the grid sectors in the gulf had oil – then there would be no need for oil companies to want to secure leases for coastal offshore drilling, but they don‘t.

The fact is that few locations authorized by Congress for drilling actually contain oil, and the oil companies know this. Their high tech equipment and ground penetrating radar satellites allow them to know where the oil is and isn’t without the need of erecting expensive oil rigs.

To make a long story short, Blitzer asks why oil companies are not drilling in these sectors. The answer, as explained by Velshi in the rest of the segment, is that the oil companies are doing just fine the way things are, and that it’s all about oil company profits.

Velshi tries to explain oil company motives through his own liberal lens, ignoring that mining more oil will create the need for more refineries to process it into gasoline, which Congress has yet to approve. They give no clue to the viewers that over 50% of wells drilled in the U.S. have come up dry, or that areas in the gulf not being drilled contain no pockets of oil. They attempt to leave the viewing audience with the impression that the Gulf of Mexico is filled with oil, not water.

On Saturday, an article appeared on the CNN website entitled: Oil Production lagging – U.S. official which had the subtitle: “Energy secretary says that United States and other nations must conserve more. Speculators not to blame for high prices, he adds. In fact, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman didn’t say that in his statements at the conference. What he did say was:

“First, all nations must change the way we use energy . . . and I put my own country, the United States, at the top of the list. We have a lot of work to do. Increasing the energy efficiency of our economies is an absolute necessity.”

That was as close as he ever came in talking about oil “conservation.” Bodman called for more “efficiency,” but the bulk of his comments focused on increased oil production and “transparency” in oil speculating, which were ignored in the CNN article. He said oil speculating was only a part of the overall problem.

He also focused on how we got into this mess with 30 years of bans on additional oil production. Bodman’s comments can be found here at the DOE website.

Let’s review the facts on today’s gas prices. There are five basic issues contributing to the high cost of gas:

1. Due to 30 years of government restrictions and regulations, U.S. oil production has not been allowed to expand to keep up with growing demands, forcing us to depend on foreign oil from sources like OPEC. We have no control over world oil market prices.

2. Growing economies and industry in countries like China and India have drastically increased the demand for world oil supplies driving the demand up and the supply down. It’s a matter of supply and demand.

3. Big investors like George Soros have bought up huge supplies of oil on the commodities market and bid the price up over the past few years through oil price speculations. We wouldn’t be in this mess today if speculators hadn’t been playing poker with our fuel supplies.

4. Democrat politicians beholding to liberal environmentalist groups and Al Gore’s global warming agenda want oil to cost as much as their “alternative energy” technology to make them economically feasible. Only when gasoline is as expensive to produce as ethanol, windmills, and solar panels, will people invest in them and use them.

5. The decline in the value of the dollar during the Bush Administration means it takes more dollars to buy a barrel of oil. By flooding the market with more paper dollars to avoid a recession on his watch, Bush has essentially made the dollar worth only about half of what it was before he took office. OPEC doesn’t want to loose money by selling oil at the old dollar value price.

At a mere 4%, oil company profits are not a factor in today’s price of gas. With gas at $4.50 a gallon, the oil company makes an 18c profit, while the federal government is making 18.4c in taxes per gallon. State governments then add on their taxes which average 28.6c per gallon according to Wikipedia. (These numbers reflect a revision/correction to numbers published in my previous articles.)

The 18 cents the oil company makes, is then distributed to millions of stockholders. There is no one sitting in the board room getting rich from oil company profits at your expense. The remaining $4.03 pays for crude oil purchases, exploration and drilling, and refining costs. The huge profits reported in oil companies’ quarterly reports are a result of extremely high volume sales, not high profit margins.

When you consider that government is making more money from a gallon of gas than the oil companies are, and if we accept the claim that oil companies are making excessive profits, then we must also conclude that politicians are charging excessive taxes on gas.

Democrats have absolutely no interest in doing anything that would bring down the price of gas. They need it to go even higher to achieve their new “progressive” socialist society that runs without oil, or a free market, or personal liberty, or profit.

CNN is a willing partner at best, and a co-conspirator at worst, of the Democrat party for which CNN is in the role of public relations for the DNC. This is obvious to anyone with a fair mind while watching any of CNN’s political coverage. But when CNN allows their political agenda to get in the way of reporting truthfully on something as important as our current energy crisis, that is bordering on treason and betrayal of our country.

CNN’s broadcast license, issued to serve the public interest, should be evaluated, and investigated by Congress instead of them wasting time with their ongoing investigation into who outed Valerie Plame, as they are now still doing.

How are Americans supposed to be accurately informed on important issue when we can’t trust the television news media to report fair and unbiased truths – when we have a media that focuses their reports on the tiniest detail of an issue that fits their left wing template, and ignores or spins the real substance of the issue to hide it from the public?

The answer is, we can’t. It’s not just CNN, but the entire television news media that conspires in this deception, some, like NBC and CBS are even worse. It’s no wonder that America today is so screwed up after being subverted for decades by this cabal of propagandists.

The only way that we are going to separate the spin from the facts is to listen to conservative talk radio or read “new media” websites on the Internet. It is unfortunate that in today’s world, Americans who want to know the truth have to go looking for it on the Internet, rather than trusting your evening news to report accurately on it.

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JR Dieckmann is Editor, Publisher, Writer, and Webmaster of GreatAmericanJournal.com. He also works as an electrician in Los Angeles, Ca. He has been writing and publishing articles on the web since 2000. His articles appear on other publications such as: The Conservative Voice; Real Clear Politics; New Media Journal; Mich News; Daley Times-Post; Renew America, The Reality Check, and other conservative websites. JR can be contacted at http://www.greatamericanjournal.com/contact.htm.

O’Reilly has to maintain a reputation of “fairness”. He’s independent so it doesn’t sound good if he always agrees with the right. I “amen” a fair share of what he says on the radio, but I have recently heard plenty (concerning oil) that I didn’t agree with at all.

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